Seeing famous actors e.g. Robin Williams, and Bruce Willis suffering from dementia made me wonder in later stages do the people still aware of death? We all know death because we know the process we learn from or it’s just that we instinctively aware of it?
It’s hard to say because by the time you’re in what would generally be considered late stage, you really aren’t able to communicate effectively.
What I can say is that what communication I have had with people that far gone did not entail anything about death. They weren’t doing their screaming or babbling or general word salad about death in any perceptible way. Overall, I’d say half of the patients I took care of were patients because of some kind of dementia, and I was very often there at the very end of their process.
I never had any patient close to the end that had a form of dementia as their primary diagnosis bring up death at all. Meaning, no Alzheimer’s type out dementia. Now, patients that exhibited dementia-like symptoms as a result of some other condition (usually brain tumors) did, in a small handful of instances say and do things that made it seem like death was on their mind.
Out of those, there’s only two where I feel confident that what they were saying was about their perception that they were dying, rather than it being more likely that it was a product of the same kind of random things that weren’t a sure sign that they were aware of their dying, if that makes sense.
Someone just saying disjointed strings of things that happen to include the words death or dying, it’s impossible to be sure what they were thinking or feeling. Because it could be jumbled in with completely unrelated things.
But yeah, those two in specific, I’m fairly sure that they were at least partially aware of the fact that they were near death. Both of them said that they wanted to die, at some point in the process, though they didn’t always say that. One of them said they weren’t ready, or that they didn’t want to go yet.
I don’t know, and there’s no way to know for sure, what they were thinking, if it was conscious thought, or even if it was actually them rather than just misfiring brains parroting things they’d heard in the past. But I “felt” like it was them, whatever kernel of their mind was left.
Very insightful thanks!
I think yes, but how they experience it may be different from how they would have if they didn’t have dementia. It also varies person to person, and time to time.
This elderly lady I know, she would talk about experiences from decades ago as if it was recent. But from time to time she’d also talk about missing the people in those stories knowing that they passed away.
It must be hard for them too trying to work through it all
Yes at a certain point I think that vivid memories are more powerfully connected to our brains than new sensory input is. As my grandfather declined he would look across the room at someone and think they were someone out of his past. And I don’t mean strangers walking past. He once thought his son-in-law, known for 40 years, was an old coworker.
Depending on the damage done to the brain, it could be a full-on recognition of impending death or just a primal, lizard brain fear that something is wrong and getting worse. I think Robin Williams was in the first category, and he was so fearful of the future that he took his own life and prevented himself from reaching stage two.
Late stage dementia can’t even feed themselves, so no.
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You can help someone learn in a much nicer way than by making fun of their mistakes.
I suspect you don’t aware.
I’m having a strange moment on Lemmy right now. Just like you, I was bothered that the title of this post was grammatically weird so I made a comment similar to the one you made, but yesterday I noticed my comment was getting some downvotes so I deleted it.
Then I woke up this morning to find this in my inbox and I thought, “oh great what did I do now?” so I went to click on it and my comment is gone Because I’ve already deleted it,
so how did this person respond to my comment that I deleted?
I’m wondering, can everyone still see that comment I deleted but me?
I vaguely remember it, it was something like “do you are like cheese?”
can everyone still see that comment I made yesterday even after I deleted it?
I think it’s a quirk of federation; the comment may have propagated to other instances and been replied to by other users on that instance before the deletion propagated.
One way to circumvent this issue is to not delete your comments just because they get a few downvotes. You’re not getting paid for Lemmy Karma.
It’s all good, not really good with english grammar in general. I hope you got a good chuckle with my used of are in such a weird way. 😅
